The large sums the United States must pay for interest on the national debt hav; become a significant barriekg, to a balanced federal budgetf For fiscal 1983 which ends Sept, ID, the Office of Management and Budget estimates interest on the debt at $129 billion. The figure- isprojccted for $144.5 billion next year. Thus, interest has become a very major budget item and the citizenry must con- ‘ tinue to pay heavily for deeades of rod ink outlays by the big spenders. , What about the debt itself?. it took America 909 years to. accumulate a national debt of,. a half-trillion dollars as of. the mid-1970’s But alhalk dozal years later – beforei the close of 1991 – profligate peacetime spending hadsslry- H rocketed tl1e debt to $1 trillion. That’s a thousand billion dollars! To insure funding of goverrunent operations through fiscal 1993, Congress raised the debt ceiling last June to $1.389 trillion, about $6,000 for every American. Administration explerts say the need could reac $2 trillion by -lM6. What will the annual interest total then? Latest estimates put budget deficits at $H)9.8 billion this fiscal ear, $179.7 billion for fiscal, lwl, and down to $82.3 billion by 1999. With a great deal of justification, President Reagan blames the unprecedented deficits of his years on policies and commitments of past administrations. You cannot stop a freight train on a dime. . in the 53 years since 1930, ‘Oangress has balanced the budget only eight times four under President Truman, three in the Eisenhower years, and in 1969 under President Nixon. From $16 billion ($312 per capita) in 1930, the national debt grew to $211 billion in 1946 at the close of World War ll. Considering the Great Depression pumppriming and the massive war, the figure seemed within rmson. In 1969, the last year of Praident Eisenhower’s second term, the federal budget was just $92,2 billion, with the debt at $291 billion. The budget was balanced that year for the second-to-last time. Now, 23 years later, the buaget has exploded to more than eight times that size tw)5.2 billion for fiscal 1983). The rise in spending and debt was gzadua for a time, but by 19 t.he buiget was $196.6 billion and e debt $393 billion, In 1975, with the Vietnam War now history, the budget had climbed to $326 billion and the debt was at $544 billion. The effects of inflation as well as expanding welfare-social-medical pmgrams were being felt by the taxpayers. The surge of both the budget and the debt has been appalling since then – peacetime years when the country should have been building a surplus or at least reducing the debt. Historically, interest on the national debt started out as a relatively-benign package in the budget picture. its growth in recmt decades to the specter it now represents, is portrayed by these OMB figures: 1950, $5,7 billion; 1960, $9,2 billion; 1970, $19.3 billion; 1975, $32.7 billion; 1990, $74,8 billion; 1533, $128 billion (estimate): and 1984, $144.5 billion testimate), For a well-resourced nation like the U,S. to find itself mired in the red ink morass is deplorable, in private enterprise, a business which continually spends more than it takes in is soon doomed to bankniptcy. Fourteen years without a balanced budget (the last was 1969) is unconscionable, and obviously there are more deficit years immediately ahead. The eight surpluses in 53 years do little to improve the picture. You don’t have to be an economist to sense the deteriorating effect all this has on American strmgth. economic and otherwise. Indeed, heavy U.S. borrowing to service its debt competes with private enterprise funding and undermines its own goal of bringing down interest rates. The time is long sasl due for Congresses an Presidents to put aside party politics and unite on a bipartisan basis to carry out the mandate of the people. balance the budget, and deal with the nationl debt and its heavy interest costs. We need to heed the counsel of wise Founding Fathers George Washington said it well in his 1797 Farewell Address: ”… Cherish public credit use it as sparingly as possibly avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavailable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.”